"...It's kind of like living in a shadow. It sounds funny, but that's what it feels like.

I want to be able to walk and say: 'Hey, This is who I am. This is what I am. This ain't what you want me to be. This ain't what I'm thinking to be. This is me.'...

..I'm hoping it [DNA test result] is what I'm thinking it is. I'm hoping that I am a white American...

...They [blacks] got it rough, I know. If I'm gonna be black I don't want to be in America. Because they don't get a fair shake.

I'm ready... Here we go.

It says 75% European... so I'm all... I'm white! [Be]cause I've only got 22% of African and only 3% of Asian. So hey... that's sweet! When they ask me 'what you are?' I can tell them now. I'm part of the community now. I'm a white boy! I'm as white as snow... I just can't believe that I'm a white man. I can actually say I'm a white man now. I'm happy! [laughter] I can't believe this. I should have done this years ago."

-Jeff Harris (Janitor, Waverly, Ohio Courthouse) on his racial identity before and after reading the results of his DNA ancestry results.

The tribe of fatherless girls that make up T Kira Maddenâ€™s titular chapter are three high school friends bonded by loss, lust, recklessness and love. But the tribe extends much further, shape-shifting throughout the memoir from youthful friendships to romantic partners, from a nuclear family to a revision of that family history. Though the tribe expands, Maddenâ€™s devoted, imperfect relationships with girls and women form the centrifugal force around which her story spins. This is a fearless debut that carries as much tenderness as pain. The author never shrinks from putting herself back into the world after every hurt, and we are lucky for it.

The memoir is told in fragmented chapters, many of which read like self-contained essays. They are arranged into three mostly chronological sections that follow Maddenâ€™s life from early memories to the death of her father when she is 27. Madden renders her mourning viscerally: â€śMy hands â€” they are never not shaking,â€ť and yet still, when she falls asleep, â€śitâ€™s the women who come first.â€ť…

Occupying the peculiar liminal space between the fiction of race and the realities of its imposition has presented me a strange reality as a multiracial Black adult of the African diaspora: Black to some, mixed race to others, generally confusing to many; white women touching my hair without permission; South Asian old ladies looking at me with suspicion; sideways looks from cops who presume Iâ€™m up to no good. If youâ€™re a Black-coded mixed-race person, the cops donâ€™t care who your parents are. I identify as Black because thatâ€™s how the world interacts with me. I am also mixed race. The language of halves and quarters does not serve us. We are whole, complex human beings.

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I could imagine the disapproval he [my stepfather] would have shown for my future husband and son simply because they are black. The thought was unbearable. Determined not to let a deceased manâ€™s ideas control my life, I decided I would gather my immediate family to be open with them about my love and my pregnancy.

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.

With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

In Korea, starting at the age of five, he ran barefoot in the snow when he was training for tae kwon do, so he was ready, during the Korean War, for when he and his oldest brother had to steal food from overturned army supply trucks, running the bags of rice home on their backs. After the war, he became the international tae kwon do champion in his age group at the age of eighteen, and captain of his college rugby team â€” the rice had helped two ways.

He left for the US while his father was away on business so he couldnâ€™t stop him. His mother gave him a gold belt buckle to sell when he arrived, as she couldnâ€™t give him money, and asked him, whatever he did, not to marry a blue-eyed, blonde-haired American girl…